Creating a restaurant floor plan involves knowing every detail of the space you have, the type of food you’ll be serving and what your audience demands. The floor plan must fit your concept and help enhance your restaurant’s brand name. It also must allow your employees to have enough space to do their jobs.

Allocating Space

Figure out how much of your available space will become the dining area, and how much reserved for the kitchen and other prep space. While different restaurants have their own needs, a good rule of thumb is that approximately 60 percent of your square footage should be the dining area and 40 percent for everything else. This also helps determine how many seats you’ll have. A general restaurant averages around 15 square feet per person in its dining area. If you have a 3,000 square-foot restaurant and a dining area of 1,800 square feet, that would leave you with a capacity of about 120 diners.

Fit Your Concept

Your floor plan has to fit both your theme and your customer base. If you’re trying to attract customers with small children, for example, you may want something bright and spacious with wide aisles offering more room to maneuver. For a romantic dining establishment, you may instead want lower lights and smaller tables. A fine-dining restaurant likely will have fewer seats per square foot, as diners will demand more space between their table and the neighboring one. If you’re featuring a bar, there should be about two feet between stools.

Divide and Conquer

If your available space is big enough, consider creative ways of dividing it up. Dividing a cavernous room into a few smaller dining areas can help patrons feel like the restaurant is busy and avoids the sense of being alone in a large space. You might separate a few larger tables into their own room to help keep large parties from overwhelming the entire place.

Path to the Food

Make sure your servers have a clear path from the kitchen to the table area. The longer the distance they have to travel, the more likely that food will have cooled by the time it is set in front of the guests. Your wait staff shouldn’t have to run an obstacle course to run that dinner special from the kitchen to the far corner of the room.